[2] Previously, he has served as Minister of Telecommunications and Information Technology from 2002 to 2004 and later as a security advisor for President Hamid Karzai.

[4] Masoom Stanekzai was born in 1958 in the village of Mughul Khel in the Mohammad Agha District of Logar Province.

He served in the ANA for more than a decade rising to the rank of colonel during the regime of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).

On 20 September 2011, Masoom Stanekzai was seriously injured following a suicide attack that killed Peace Council Chairman Berhanuddin Rabbani.

He served as acting Minister for Defense for one year, and was then appointed as the new head of National Directorate of Security (NDS).

He resigned in 2019, following an extrajudicial killing of four Afghan civilians during a night raid conducted by a joint US and NDS unit the city of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province.

NDS officials claimed that those civilians who were killed during the raid were members of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).

These negotiations sought to establish an agreement for the formation of a government after the election that was to occur following the withdrawal of US and other international forces in 2021.